Katharine Whitehorn, the author of Cooking in a Bedsitter, talks to Rachel Cooke

The only time that I lived in what could reasonably have been described as a bedsitter, it benefited from a shared kitchen which meant that, though I still ate the same thing every day for six months - pasta with pesto from a jar - I was saved both the misery of my clothes smelling of this dish, and the drag of balancing said jar on my window ledge in order to keep its contents even vaguely fresh. Oh, and there was somewhere to wash up, so I didn't have to stick my one pot, plate and fork in a plastic bucket and lug it down the corridor to the bathroom at the close of every night or, let's be realistic, every week (this was actually doubly good news because I hated the idea of meeting the other inhabitants of my building, whose voices I could hear, but whose faces I had decided, in my excruciating youthful shyness, that I would rather never see; I used to time my dash to the kitchen with the EastEnders theme). But this is not to say that I do not have a working knowledge of true bedsitters - and yes, they do still exist, in spite of estate agents' profligate use of the term 'studio flat'. I love a good, boxy bedsitter, be it in an almost-forgotten novel of the 1950s, or an almost-forgotten film of the 1960s. I drive past buildings that I know, or assume, to house bedsits, their stucco peeling like eczema, their window frames rattling like old bones, and I cannot help myself from picturing the scene within: a dubious pot on an equally dubious single ring, the female in charge of it half-heartedly stirring its contents at the same time as she files her nails, reads an old Vogue, or chats to some distant parent on the telephone.

This is, I fully admit, a pretty odd kind of nostalgia, and the person I blame for it mostly is Katharine Whitehorn, whose Cooking in a Bedsitter, first published in 1961, in print and regularly updated for the next 40 years, and now triumphantly reissued in all its original greasy and hardscrabble glory by Virago (I just wish they had made the cover wipe-clean), fuelled it for many years. Though I'm not the only one. My sister, who is a decade younger than me, suffers from it, too, and is often to be found picking over Whitehorn's advice about how useful the inhabitant of a bedsitter will find a jug - it can be used to make tea and coffee, or to cook kippers - or reading, for the ninth time, the author's warning that her recipe cooking times do not include 'the time it takes you to find the salt in the suitcase under the bed'. Whitehorn says that Virago are doing the book as a kind of retro joke, and she is probably right. But however much fun it is - 'there is one powerful smell associated with making coffee in bedsitters; it is the smell of burning plastic, and will go away if you move the handle of the pot away from the flame' - if you want to know just how much eating and cooking and even living habits have changed in the years since rationing went out, and supermarkets, fridge freezers and naked greed came in, this is the Ur text. Start reading, and I guarantee that you will soon be able to smell boiled cabbage, no matter where you happen to be. Plus, the recipes, those of them that don't sound too off-putting to vacuum-wrapped, oven-ready ears, like Turbigo kidneys or tripe Catalan, do still work. Whitehorn cooked The Dish - a foolproof combination of braising steak, flour, herbs, tomato paste and vegetables - twice last week, and not one of her guests asked if the hostess couldn't please call up for a takeaway curry.

'You know how copy editors always have to change a few things?' says Whitehorn, in a deep and suitably retro voice that is two parts Diana Rigg to one part James Mason. 'She asked me if we shouldn't call tunny, tuna. No! That's the whole point. To do it as it was. I think if they had instead asked me to bring it up to date, I would have had to say no, because I really don't know how people live now. In the end, we only changed two things. One is my advice that cooks use an asbestos mat under a pan to slow cooking down, for obvious reasons. The other thing is that I have put Gavin's byline on the end of the chapter about drink [Gavin Lyall, the crime writer and Whitehorn's husband, who died in 2003], because that seemed to me to be only fair; he wrote it.' And, as she went through the proofs, how did she feel about the book, after all these years? 'Well, what struck me really is the vast variety of things that I knew about which, if you had asked me, I would have insisted that I didn't know about. Did I really know all those things?' Living alone again, she doesn't cook much now. 'Parma ham and melon is about the top of it.'

When Cooking in a Bedsitter was commissioned, Whitehorn was no kind of cook at all, a fact she carefully concealed from her new publisher. She had just been sacked from her job at Woman's Own. 'I had a burning desire for some work, simple as that.' But she had experience of bedsit land? 'Yes. There had been two. One in Streatham, a rather prissy one where men weren't allowed to come in [there is a whole section in CIAB on landladies, the horror of]. It was a reasonably nice room, but it was in Streatham. Then I got one in Notting Hill Gate, and in the same terrace lived the previous boyfriend. I never ran into him, but there was always the awful fear that one might.' By the time she began writing, however, she was married and sharing a tiny flat with Gavin so, to get into the mood, she borrowed the bedsit of a friend who was in the process of moving out. 'I spilt something disgusting on the carpet, and thought: thank God he's moving! In fact, he was going to take that carpet with him. Anyway, what was realistic about the book was that it wasn't just cooking on one ring; it was all these other ghastly complications.' By complications, she means: the aforementioned landladies; lingering smells; the problem of water, and having to fetch it from a shared bathroom; the lack of a fridge, and the difficulty of storing foods that went off quickly. Also, she had to provide a full glossary. Elizabeth David had long since told everyone about olive oil, but lots of things remained mysterious, and still had to be explained, among them aubergines, pimentos and zucchini ('small Italian marrows').

In those days, any woman who was not extremely rich cooked an awful lot (in 1958, 38 per cent of women cooked - and I mean cooked - three meals a day). Whitehorn, however, had not been encouraged to learn to do so as a young woman because her mother, who was Scottish, had been brought up to believe in 'plain living and high thinking', and found cooking boring. (In any case, if she did ever try anything new, Katharine's father, a classics master at Marlborough College, would only ask: 'Why aren't we having mince?' His favourite pudding was a 'ghastly' concoction of chocolate and cornflour, which he liked so much, he would stand ceremonially on a chair to serve it.) She only finally found herself standing over a stove when she went to study in America after her degree at Cambridge, and took her turn cooking for her flatmates (there, she also enjoyed pleasures unavailable at home, such as real orange juice; rationing, don't forget, had only finally ended in 1954).

And when she married, was it her job to put the dinner on the table even though she had a job? 'Yes. But I welcomed it. When you marry, all the things you have to bloody do anyway, you're suddenly doing for somebody you love, and it's all much better. Of course, the reverse is true now [since Gavin died]. It's back to being a bloody chore.' This is not to say that wifely cooking was not challenging at first. 'In the flat, we had a marvellous Ideal stove. One day, I put a tinned steak and kidney pie in it. I also decided to try cooking frozen peas in the oven with butter, which was just as well because, when I opened the oven to see how they were doing, the tin was like this.' She mimes the shape of a mushroom cloud. 'I took it out of the oven, and pierced the tin, at which point a huge geyser of gravy shot out of the top of it, heading straight for the ceiling. Ha!'

Whitehorn, of course, is such a great writer and such a cool-headed journalist that, as you read her recipes for 'shrimp wiggle' and 'lamb tomato quickie', for 'poulet Marengo' and 'Swedish sausage casserole', you might think her a stranger to such disasters. When, for instance, she smoothly explains, for those without a whisk, how to beat an egg white on a plate with knife - so much less wearying than going at it with a fork in a cup - she sounds as though she performs this feat every night of the week, and probably at the same time as she amends her packed engagement diary.

When she was younger, and one of the most famous, if not the most famous journalist in Britain, Whitehorn's diary was sometimes a little too packed and, lately, it is that way again; her memoir, Selective Memory, which came out last year, signalled her recovery - as much as it is possible to recover from the end of a marriage of 45 years - from the loss of Gavin, and the start, once again, of a single life. Work is not a balm, exactly, but it 'leads you into a lot of life of various sorts... one of the reasons I buy my clothes in sales or British Home Stores is that I go around with women who are younger and richer than me, and if I spent what they do on clothes, I wouldn't be able to afford the hotels'. She fell for Gavin, a pilot turned newspaper air correspondent, and journalism at pretty much the same time, when she started work on the Picture Post following a brief stint in publishing ('I was pretty wet about publishing,' she says. 'It didn't occur to me that I was in the wrong job.') and stuck with them both through thick and thin. In a way, one fed the other, her life with Lyall informing the best of the pieces that she wrote for The Observer, where she began as fashion editor ('to catch the atmosphere of the Paris collections, you must lock yourself in a hot cupboard with a bottle of spilled scent and a champagne hangover') and ended as columnist ('Have you ever taken anything out of the dirty clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?'), with stints of reporting in between (she was at The Observer from 1960 until 1996). She wrote about having it all, or the impossibility of having it all, when the writers who go on about such things now were still at primary school, pinning the exhaustion of life with two children, a husband and a full-time career wryly to the page without ever seeming to moan. To sum up: she made women - and a lot of men, too - want to cheer.

But the point is, she says now, that she did not feel like moaning. There was not much to moan about. Being a woman in a man's world worked to her advantage when it came to being appointed to the boards of organisations like British Airports (they wanted a woman, and she would do). Meanwhile, back in The Observer office, she was blessed with an editor, George Seddon, who recognised her talent and loved her voice. '[On the women's page], we were protected from the sourpusses in the main paper, the mittel-Europeans who thought they were serious.'

But seriously: how did she get everything done? When I read Selective Memory, I felt weak at the thought of her schedule, and I am Protestant to my very toenails. 'I think I probably did overdo it,' she says. 'And I think Gavin probably did resent it. But one of the things that is so different from me and my daughter-in-law is that I had an amazing amount of help: the marvellous Trudi, who came from 10 till three every weekday, and missed only one day in 17 years.' Professional salaries went further, and help cost less. 'Also, Gavin was at home [writing], if there was a fire or something. I did get them up and put them to bed... unless we were going out. But there were times when Gavin said: "Oh, for God's sake." He used to say it was the kids I was short-changing, but actually, it wasn't: it was him. Once, we went to a drinks party. We were supposed to stay for lunch, but Gavin didn't let us. I was furious. When I asked why, he said: 'Read a book on motherhood.' So I slapped his face and got a taxi home and, of course, when I got there, the help and the children were perfectly happy. I really don't think I did short-change the children, and I don't ever recall him complaining about the food.' She simply loved her job, and where was the crime in that? 'It was wonderful. Everything was great. In the right job, at last; married to the right man, at last; everyone thought I was terrific!'

I wonder if she thinks things are better, or worse, for women now, and what she makes of the trend - it feels like a trend to me - for successful, educated women to abandon entirely their jobs in order to bring up children full-time. 'Well, we have more choices, all of us. But choice doesn't necessarily make you happier. People say the steam seems to have gone out of feminism, but the answer is that they've got so much of what they wanted, and it doesn't seem to occur to them that they didn't always have these things. I understand the resentment of the women who only get a £1m bonus when the men get £2m, or whatever, but considering the things most people have to worry about... The decline in marriage has made things much tougher, I think. This business of cohabiting, the whole question of not knowing whether your relationships are meant to be permanent. It's a great strain.' Does she feel, though, that in some ways things are going backwards for women? 'The clue to this is something my son said. When my daughter-in-law stayed at home with her second child, I was a bit surprised. But Bernard said: "In your day, female empowerment meant not having to give up a job you loved because you wanted a family. But for her generation, it means doing what you want, and she wants to stay at home." Given how long we're all living, maybe people will start to have careers at the ends of their lives. Perhaps it won't be necessary to do everything at the beginning. We're living another 30 bloody years after retirement, and a 30-year sabbatical is not on the cards, so career patterns are going to have to change. I believe people are going to have to work longer, and that they will be a damn sight happier if they do, though I know it's easy for me, because I'm a journalist and that's fun; it's not the same if you're scrubbing floors. Then again, women have always worked for something more than the work itself, because their work hasn't, traditionally, been particularly enjoyable. They work for the money, the autonomy, and for the company.'

Talking about this stuff, it seems rather ironic that, of all the many words she has written, the book of Whitehorn's that is now being republished is about cookery. Then again, since all the evidence suggests that it is still women who continue to do most of the housework, irrespective of whether or not they have a job, Cooking in a Bedsitter has value both as a time-saving, cheat's guide - most of the recipes are lightning fast - and as a reminder of the dangers of the backwards glance: old-fashioned domesticity, which so many of us foolishly believe that we long for, was - and is - bloody hard work, even if you do have a fail-safe recipe for chicken à la king or corned beef hash permanently up your sleeve. Oh yes, and when it all gets on top of you, you can always calm yourself with Whitehorn's words on puddings: 'In the play The Shrike, the hero is entertaining his girl to dinner and she says: "What's for dessert?" And there is no dessert; and he tries to commit suicide. This is an extreme view... hand round some chocolates.' Personally, I fully expect Cooking in a Bedsitter to be in print for at least another 40 years. It's a classic, isn't it?

'Oh, do you think I'm up there with Hannah Glasse and Mrs Beeton?' purrs Whitehorn. She laughs. 'Nah! Not really.'

· Cooking in a Bedsitter is published by Virago, £8.99. To order with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

One pan, one ring: how to cook Sixties bedsit food

Poor man's goulash

Serves 1, takes 30 minutes

2 tomatoes or tomato paste

1 onion

1 or 2 rashers bacon

2 potatoes

paprika (essential)

salt

sour milk, optional

Start by boiling the potatoes for at least 10 minutes. Fry onion and bacon for 7 mins. Add a quarter teaspoon of paprika, salt, chopped tomatoes (or a good squeeze of paste and a little water). Stir. Add potatoes and simmer for as long as it takes for them to cook. If you have some sour milk around, add a tablespoon at the very end.

Liver and bacon

Serves 1, takes 30 minutes

¼ lb liver

1 or 2 rashers bacon

1 onion

1 tomato (optional)

2 teaspoon flour

Begin gently frying rashers and when they have given off some fat, add slices of liver that you have dipped in flour, and onion chopped very fine; fry quickly on each side; then lower gas and cook very slowly for about 7 minutes each side or more depending on the thickness of the slices. Add tomato 5 minutes before the end if you want to. Pour the gravy over the liver and bacon when you lift it on to plate. You can also fry potatoes beforehand, but use only bacon fat, for the sake of the taste.

Turbigo kidneys

Serves 1, takes 35 minutes

1 kidney

2 sausages (preferably chipolatas)

1 onion

2 oz mushrooms

1 teaspoon tomato paste

1 dessertspoon flour

2 bay leaves

Halve kidneys when removing core. Fry kidney and sausages for a minute or two, so that all sides are browned. Remove. Put in chopped onion and chopped mushroom, and fry 5 minutes. Add flour, tomato paste, bay leaves and 3 tablespoons water. Stir. Put back kidney and sausage and simmer very gently quarter of an hour.

Tripe Catalan

I am no fonder of boiled knitting than the next man, but I assure you that this is rather different from normal tripe. It really is edible.

Serves 1, takes 2¼ hours

tenpence worth of tripe (maybe ¼lb)

2 onions

salt, pepper

handfuls of herbs

2 tomatoes

1 dessertspoon tomato paste

Prepare a pot of water with the seasonings and one of the onions in it; into this, averting your eyes, empty the piece of damp blanket you will have received from the butcher. Clap the lid on and boil gently for 2 hours. Then take it out, cut into strips, flour them; fry them with the other ingredients and more herbs till onions are soft.

Egg casserole

More elaborate, this, but it makes a fine, full meal.

Serves 1, takes 20 minutes

2 eggs

1 tin condensed tomato soup

1 onion, optional

¼ teaspoon French mustard

3 tablespoons milk

salt, pepper

1 heaped dessertspoon grated cheese (mousetrap will do fine)

2 small slices bread

oil or butter

Fry chopped onion and bread till onion is golden and bread crisp. Add cheese, soup, mustard, salt and pepper over low gas; stir gently until it is one gooey mass. Add eggs and milk beaten lightly together; stir once; let it cook gently until the egg part seems set - about 5 minutes.

Cauliflower cheese

Serves 1, takes 25-30 minutes

½ small cauliflower

1 tablespoon butter

1 dessertspoon flour

rather less than 1 cup milk

1 tbs grated or finely chopped cheese

salt, pepper

Put on a pan one-third full of salted water; when it boils, add cauliflower washed and cut into pieces, add a piece of bread to absorb smell; put on lid. Boil 10 minutes (15 if you have included the tough stalks). Remove lid outside room. Drain. Make white sauce in small pan by melting butter, stirring in flour, gradually adding milk; when it thickens, add most of the cheese. Cook gently for 5 mins. Add cauliflower; cook 4 mins more. Sprinkle with remainder of cheese after it is on the plate.

Custard

¼ pint milk

1 dessertspoon sugar

1 egg yolk

Beat all this together and heat it very gently, stirring until it thickens. Do not boil. (If making larger quantities, add 1 white per 2 yolks.)

Trifle

Here is a trifle that can really be a star performance.

Serves 6

1 packet sponge fingers or some sponge cake

1 tin or frozen packet raspberries or strawberries

½ packet jelly, dissolved in water as directed on packet

1 packet lemon pie filling

1 small bottle maraschino cherries

1 bottle double cream

walnuts

2 bananas

1 wineglass sherry or rum

First put the sponge in the bottom of a big bowl, and pour half the alcohol over it. Then melt the jelly, add about one-quarter of the fruit to it. Pour over the sponge cake. Leave that in a cool place while you make up the lemon pie filling according to the directions on packet. When it is ready, spread half the cherries and all of the remaining fruit on to the sponge-and-jelly mixture. Pour over the rest of the alcohol, and then the lemon filling. Slice the bananas and add to the filling. Some will sink in, some won't. Near the time of serving, whip the cream, add a heaped teaspoon of sugar to it, spread evenly on trifle and - at the last moment, because they sometimes sink in - decorate with the remaining cherries and halved walnuts. Whatever you leave out, don't leave out the fruit.